Play Dead
by Neko Kuroban
Summary: Ilah never looks back to see if there were warnings she missed along the way. Why should she? Ilah and Azulon. AU.


**Play Dead  
>Neko Kuroban<strong>

* * *

><p>Well.<p>

All right.

If she is being reasonable—and he says she never is, and her friends would have agreed with him for very different reasons, and probably even the family she no longer has (never had?) would have found it very difficult to disagree—she will admit to this much: their marriage is not perfect.

_But then_, she adds, chin down and eyes up, _nothing ever is. Right? _

Right.

(Maybe.)

* * *

><p>Kanako is one of her dearest friends.<p>

They had lived together once upon a time, roommates closer than sister, two girls with no ties to anyone against horrible jobs, against wicked men, against the big bad city. When they were twenty, Kana had been the level-headed one with her cool eyes set on her ideal man, her beautiful home, her dreams of a family; Ilah had been wild and impractical and subject to countless flights of whimsy.

Ilah thinks it's funny how life works out. There had been no way to tell which of them would be the one to marry, to move to the suburbs, to make her son the center of her universe. Twenty years ago, she would have laughed if someone had held up a mirror in which her fate was reflected. _I won't disappear into an ordinary life_, she had written in her diary at nineteen. _I won't, I won't! _

How strange and beautiful life can be, she finds herself thinking. It is August and unseasonably cool. The sky threatens rain, and the air smells like exhaust and tastes like lightning storm: it reminds her not of trouble looming on the horizon but of the day she met the man who would become her everything.

She wiggles her fingers in greeting to the doorman of Kana's building, and he all but rushes to wisk the heavy paper shopping bags from her arms. His gaze is locked on the strip of bare skin between her skirt and her stockings, and she winks when she manages to catch his eye. He reddens, which delights her to no end.

_Poor thing! I think I embarassed him._

It is harmless flirtation, and she sees no reason to take shame in it. This is an argument she and her husband have had a thousand times—one where their positions have changed countless times, one they will still be fighting in another twenty years, she is sure, as she doubts it will ever be resolved.

He has never had a problem luring women to him, once he resolves himself to, and she has always attracted male attention. She still does, even married for twenty years. She looks ten years younger than she is most days—and even younger in some lights. In some situations, she finds herself mistaken for an adolescent, although surely she was confused for a far lovelier girl than she had been at eighteen, scrawny and clad in ill-fitting hand-me-downs and hiding behind a home haircut.

Just the night before, her husband and his colleague (one she had insisted on having over; she wanted to introduce him to a newly widowed friend of hers) had arrived unexpectedly early, an hour before they were due. She had not had the chance to change out of her loose clothes—house shoes and a peasant dress with no bra underneath; her breasts had been sore as of late—and pin up her hair. The man—a stranger to her—had made a crack about her husband having a child bride. She had giggled and made a joke of the whole affair as she fixed cocktails and bustled up the stairs, but after good food and good drinks and good conversation, after their guests had left reeking of brandy and cigar smoke and good times, after she had gathered all the empty glasses, her husband had been furious with her.

"God damn it, Ilah," he had said, and no good conversation has ever started with those words.

He had accused her of deliberately dressing and acting like a juvenile for attention (among other things, the drama that always played itself out when they quarreled), and she had woken this morning determined to surprise him. She was going to the city anyway, she reasoned; she might as well surprise him. She took care as she bathed in perfumed water, as she dressed in pumps and stockings and a neat tailored dress, as she made herself up with mascara and red lipstick; by the time she finished, the mirror showed not herself but one of his associates wives, the kind of woman she saw at social functions, the kind of woman she always pitied with their downcast eyes and simpering smiles, the kind of woman she had loathed when they were all girls of twenty in it together—trust fund girls from Connecticut with college degrees, working in typing pools until they met a man worthy of marriage and set their sights on him the way a man had once been rumored to have gunned for her poor dead sister.

"Thank God I got out of my doctor's appointment sooner than I expected, because I had time to stop by Bendel's. And I have a salon appointment at three," she sings, letting herself into Kana's apartment.

The door is unlocked; it probably has been since she called the night before to say that she was taking the train into the city for a doctor's appointment but she was free until dinner. She leaves her shopping bags scattered across the cramped foyer, the way she had when they shared a two room apartment that had felt more like home than anywhere she had lived before (or, if she is being honest, anywhere she has lived since).

"I'm getting my hair cut!"

The other woman is seated at her writing desk, bent over her typewriter, and she does not answer until she has completed whatever thought was in her head. Ilah knows her well enough to expect this, but it does not keep her from feeling like a child waiting for Mother's acknowledgement. She hates standing still, so she bustles around the living room, plumping throw pillows and throwing the drapes open as if this were residence were her own.  
>Finally, Kanako stops typing and turns her wooden chair around to regard Ilah. Kana is plumper than she used to be; her figure had rivaled a pin up girl's in her prime, but her life is a peaceful, solitary one characterized mostly by periods of practicality—working at the magazine, head of a department staffed by otherwise serious college girls with stars in their eyes who worship her more than any boyfriend—and familiar excess. She eats at the same restaurants she had in her youth, she drinks the same cocktails, she keeps the same friends and she sleeps with the same man she had for the past twenty years.<p>

(Ilah apologizes for Kanako in her head. As far as she's concerned, the question isn't why is Kana still with him but why did his wife marry him knowing about Kanako. Sometimes, in her darker moments, however, she regards her oldest friend as something of a cautionary tale. See, ladies, this is the other side of being a one-man woman in love with a many-women man. This is the ending where you don't have the ring on your finger and the priest willing to pretend and the beautiful photo albums filled with picture after picture of beaming, white-gowned you.)

Ilah is suddenly uncomfortably aware of her dress and heels, her white silk stockings and white silk scarf. She feels like she is waiting for judgment as Kanako looks at her...and then her friend snorts in amusement and shakes her head.

Ilah relaxes and drops onto the ottoman, sticking her legs out straight in front of her. She hates wearing hose, but perhaps she can convince herself that today it's part of the fun. "At least I'm not doing it myself this time, right?"

"But darling," Kana drawls. "I loved your attempts at DIY."

Ilah shrieks laughter at the memory. "I had half an inch of hair, and you kept goading me!"

"You were ahead of your time, that's all."

"That was twenty years ago, and I still haven't seen anyone else with such awful hair!"

"Give it five more years, and then you can tell me that I'm wrong."

Kanako's apartment, paid for by her lover as part of their arrangement, is a world removed from their horrible little tenement in the slums, but they migrate to the kitchen, just as they used to. Ilah fills the kettle on and steps out of her shoes on her way to put it on the range—her habit when returning home. Kana fetches the white mugs and a tin of tea down from the cupboard, rummaging in the ice box and the pantry until she finds food enough for a meal.

Their brunch is haphazard, but not the way it used to be: red apples, toast with strawberry jam, tea, and a box of cookies that had been a gift from one of the girls who came from Texas to New York to spend the summer with Mrs. Karen Andrews. (Kanako's legal name, adopted upon her marriage, had become her pen name, and it had lasted much, much longer than the infamously short—at least, within their circle of friends—union, which had not even made it to a year before the decision to annul.)

Kanako eats an apple like she always has: she makes the act of biting into fruit something obscene. She opens a bottle of wine, but Ilah looks down at her plate, filled with nothing but pink frosted cookies, and she demurs. She knows her husband would hate the idea of her indulging with spirits so early in the day.

The other woman notices her sneak a glance at the clock and remarks, as she fills her own glass to the brim, "You know, noon isn't a magical beer o' clock."

Ilah colors. "I know that!"

Her fingers flutter up to her pearls, and she hates herself for it. She wants to appear at ease, so she makes a show of making herself comfortable in the hard kitchen chair: she rolls down her stockings, she removes her gloves, she shrugs out of her cropped jacket, she unwinds the kerchief tied around her neck—

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn.

How had she forgotten? She reaches blindly for the triangle of lemon-yellow silk, but she knows that her friend has already seen what she had worked so hard that morning in an attempt to hide.

"It's nothing," she says immediately.

"I didn't ask," Kana says levelly, because this is a dance that she already knows, and Ilah resolves that the rest of this visit will be a pleasant one.

* * *

><p>It actually is, up until the end. She is running late for her salon appointment, but she had expected that; she probably would have missed it altogether if Kanako's man—who she called her fiancee, and had been calling her fiancee long before and long after he married another woman—had not called to announce that it has been an awful day, that his wife is a nightmare, that the children are a headache, that he has every incompetant from here to New Jersey in his employ, and that he is on his way.<p>

"Sounds like you're in for something interesting," Ilah says with a smirk. "Be good. And if you can't be good, have fun!" It's something she tells her son constantly, but here in the tiled entryway to a one-bedroom apartment it takes on an entirely different meaning. She air-kisses her friend goodbye, throwing her arms gaily around her neck. "I love you!"

Kanako sighs. "I know you do." With that, she pecks the top of her head. It reminds Ilah of something, but she does not know quite what.

She thinks Kana is going to send her off with the usual take care, but what follows seems to surprise them both:

"Are you happy?"

Ilah means to reply with_ of course, you know I am_, but her response catches her off-guard. "Kana?" she begins, and if her husband were here, he would ridicule her for sounding so very much like a child afraid of chastisement.

"Mm?"

"Kana, I'm going to have another baby."

* * *

><p>Ilah misses her salon appointment.<p>

Kanako calls her lover to tell him that he should lie to his wife and come for dinner instead. "I'm making steak," she says. "No, I'm not wearing anything under my apron," she adds, looking down at her print house dress and rolling her eyes. She ends the conversation as swiftly as possible and all but drags Ilah into the next room. "We need to talk."

* * *

><p>As always, Kanako asks all the wrong questions.<p>

Yes, Ilah means to say that she is happy. Yes, Ilah means to say that she is in love. Yes, Ilah means to say that she has everything she ever wanted. No, Ilah never looks back to see if there were flags, warning signs she missed along the way. As far as she is concerned, there was nothing that required a warning.

There still is not.

* * *

><p>Women her age don't just <em>have another baby<em>, and the idea, the possibility, the action of saying the words aloud, even to her oldest friend, makes her stomach churn with something that alternates between unrestrained joy and abject terror.

Her husband had proposed to her because she was with child. She had no doubt that he loved her, but he had asked her to marry him because she was carrying his son. (And how she had prayed that their first child would be a boy, because she knew he would love a son in the way that he would never be able to love a daughter.)

She had said _yes, I will_ and she had said _I do_, because she loved him but also because she was having a baby and because she had been twenty years old and what if saying no cost her him forever? Love, life—nothing ever seems as important, as immediate, as urgent as it does when you are twenty years old. Wearing his ring was enough to encourage strangers to keep their wayward glances to themselves, and the wedding was soon enough, the cut of her gown clever enough, that it is impossible to tell in the pictures unless you know what to look for—the roundness of her face, the swell of her breasts, her wider hips.

Her only living relatives had not been appeased by the ring on her finger, and her aunt had pieced together the reasons behind the hasty marriage in a heartbeat. Ilah had never been able to lie to anyone, even the woman she had known would make her feel like trash for having a baby so young. Her aunt had not been content hanging up the telephone until Ilah—and considering that her aunt and uncle had a party line, probably half the town—was well aware that she was a whore and that the woman had no plans to sit through a wedding she regarded as a sham.

And Ilah wasn't stupid: she had known what her husband's friends thought of her. And she had known what their wives saw. As much as she had looked down upon them then, they had pitied _her_.

Still, it had been worth it, hadn't it? She had been smitten with her son from his very first breath. And when they had placed him, clean and swaddled, into her arms, she had felt nothing short of victorious._ I did this! _She had wanted to yell, dizzy with the elation of triumph. _Me! All by myself! _She had wanted to kiss the doctor and dance in the hallway as if it was a back room in a cabaret, but even she had her limits. When her husband had finally been permitted in, it was a struggle to sit still and keep her expression serene and beatific, a mysterious, content Madonna, just as she had practiced.

Scarcely a year had passed before she decided that she wanted another baby—and desperately.

She enjoyed sex with her husband; she loved sex with her husband. (That was part of the reason why he had ended up her husband, wasn't it?) Trying for a baby, however, made her miserable. It had been so simple to get pregnant the first time! She did everything the magazines, the gossips at the hair salon, the nice old dears at church told her to. She bought her husband shirts and stole the cardboard to make charts, which she hid under a dozen slips in her underwear drawer and on which she wrote her temperature every morning. She tracked the days of her cycle. She ate eggs on toast and drank warm milk sweetened with vanilla.

When she bled for the sixth month in a row, she wept bitterly and abandoned the entire project.

But then one month she didn't, and she didn't the month after that, or the following month, and she finally dared to let herself hope.

The pregnancy was hard, childbirth harder, and her daughter was weak. Her hair was darker than Ilah's own, rich and dark like her husband's, though her eyes were amber rather than brown. She was beautiful, but that was hardly enough. How could it be when she was so thin that her own father refused to hold her? When her skin was so pale it was translucent enough to see the veins at her temples that made it easy to imagine her body as nothing more than a network of veins and tissue? When she coughed until breathing was not just difficult but an impossibility?

Ilah waited like Penelope, like Alcyon, like Ceres.

She watched for any sign of improvement with starving eyes, and she hung on the doctor's every word. Her friends filled her ears with words so sweet, so reassuring, so precisely what she needed that it hurts to remember them whenever she lets her remember. Everyone told her the baby would be fine. The baby would gain weight. The baby would fight off the infection in her lungs.

As usual, everyone was wrong.

Ilah had not wanted to try again for a very long time after that, and she knew what people believed. They thought that she, in her grief, had refused her husband. Surely the loss of that child and her ensuing reaction had to be what caused him to take his pleasure elsewhere, they reasoned, eyeing her above the rim of their champagne flutes at parties. Never would they imagine—cool, even-tempered Azulon Hamill and his much younger bride—that the affairs had begun long before and that they would continue long after. People always were eager to believe the worst of her.

She had never been in despair like she had been then. She had managed to move past her grief only because she loved him with everything they had. Loved them both, because there wasn't a him anymore and saying_ I love him_ only served to confuse her. (Once she had been so certain._ I love him, I love him, I love him!_she had extolled in her diary.)

Her son was the light of her life, and she had hated the cliche of the phrase until the day she saw him take his first steps in the sunshine. There had been no hesitation in his actions, and when he stumbled and fell in the sweet-smelling grass, he only laughed and picked himself up. The truth of it had slammed into her like a weight: he was the center around which she made her orbit. As he grew, she came to admit that her husband was her moon—beautiful but cold, brilliant but not life-sustaining, even brighter due to reflected glory.

She had loved him once—loved him madly, loved him deeply, loved him so much that she used to wonder if it was safe or even _sane_. It couldn't be normal to want a man until you were convinced that you would go out of your mind wanting him, until you were certain that you would never be the same unless you could have him, until you pretended to be angry when he showed up and grinned every time he left just so he would be convinced that you were interesting, until you talked about him to anyone who would listen with half an ear.

She had not been a virgin the first time she had made love to him. (Nice girls do; they just pretend they don't. Such was her experience.) However, she had experienced an entirely new sense of discovery the first time he took her; he had manipulated her body as if he owned it.

"What are you doing?" she had asked as his hands slid under her skirt, as his thumb ran over the front of her panties, teasing her through the fabric—and she had flushed, even then, realizing that it was a foolish schoolgirl's question.

He had not laughed, although every fiber of her being wanted him to. His answer made up for it. "You," he had said into her neck as he parted her thighs.

Their courtship had been an education for her—not only sexual. It was an awakening of an entirely different sort. The world he introduced her to was one she had seen only through tears in the curtain, one she had experienced secondhand and never dared to imagine for herself. He romanced her in the lavish way a man romances a naive young woman fifteen years his junior and nowhere near his equal, and she was the most hopelessly devoted—and endlessly enthusiastic—of acolytes.

Twenty years have passed, and she has everything she never let herself hope for: the beautiful house, the son who still takes her breath away (the old triumph—_I did this! Me!_—has yet to fade), and a husband she cannot keep her hands off of, one who, for better or worse, feels the same way.

And before the next spring comes, she will have a new baby besides.

Imagine!

* * *

><p>Her son is packing, and Ilah is laying on his bed. "I'm awful at packing," she had said, "but I thought you might like company, at least." She is almost proud that Iroh packs like she does: one object of practical use, two random items that have no purpose but that absolutely cannot be left behind, leaving the room to fetch something that might have only the faintest connection to the previous three, followed by something practical.<p>

Her son is talking about San Francisco, where he spent the summer, as if it is heaven, filling her in on his ideals and his plans; he is honest enough with her that he feels comfortable sharing his dissatisfaction with the idea of college, even if it is Berkeley. She can understand: she had never had a head for school. She tells him as much. "Some people aren't made for it," she muses. "There's really no shame in it."

The man on the radio is talking about all the ways the world might end.

"Just think," she says, laying on her stomach on the bed.

She had found a Matchbox car—one of the hard metal ones with the sharp edges she always used to step on, the kind that wound themselves up when you pulled them back and lurched forward when released—in the debris of his closet, and she was utterly charmed. She kept dragging it backwards over the bedspread, letting it shoot forward to crash into a pile of books that looked as though they had never been opened.

"Somewhere behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Russia, there is a nineteen-year-old packing a station wagon with everything he thinks is useful."

The toy crashes into the wall, and he does not notice except to, laughing, lean forward to pick it up. He tosses it gently onto the bedspread, where it bounces once, twice and is still. "Do they have station wagons in the Soviet Republic?"

"They must," she says. "I mean, can you imagine trying to fit everything you own on a dog sled?"

It probably isn't very funny—she can't imagine, say, her husband being amused—but her son has always had her odd sense of humor. "You can't even nap in the back of a dog sled."

"Might be tricky to convince a girl to join you back there."

He laughs. She likes that he has a big, full laugh, like hers, one that starts somewhere deep and shoves its way to the surface. "If a girl isn't willing to join me on the back of a dog sled, I know she's not worth the cost of dinner."

There is a public service announcement on the radio, and there is a water pipe sticking out of her son's trunk. (He doesn't fold his clothes when he packs them, she notes. He gets that from her.) His father would be infuriated and threaten all manner of things, but she understands. She is old enough now that she is starting to see that every generation has its own obsessions and ideologies. For hers, it was pretending that all would be well. For his, it was driving across the country to plant shrubs in People's Park, to burn effigies of straw men in the desert, and to tuck flowers into guns held by stony-faced National Guardsmen.

And she once auditioned for a part in Reefer Madness. She knows her youth wasn't anything near as idyllic as her contemporaries try to paint it. It was the 1950s, not another universe altogether. People still used drugs, people still drank, people still swore in the street and lit cigarettes and had sex and came home determined to be furious with their wives.

"You smoke dope, don't you?"

He can't breathe; he's laughing too hard. "High on life," he insists. "With occasional forays into the world of alternative states of consciousness."

"I'm hip to the situation," she says in her very most prim voice, a parody of the voice she adopts at cocktail parties. "But you left your bong out, so you might want to put that away before your father gets home," she adds, more impish now.

He shoves it down under some loose garments, a half-hearted attempt at concealment. "I guess this is everything I need—" He attempts to pull the zipper closed, but the metal teeth refuse to come together. He does not swear or show any signs of frustration. He only shrugs. "Looks like I need to try again."

She loves him, for that. "I'll mail the rest. Even if there isn't anything else you need, I'll still mail you presents."

"Give it to someone who needs it," he suggests instead.

She sits up and hugs her legs to her chest; she is nearly forty, but she is still limber enough for this. "Did I ever tell you that when I was your age, I ran away from home?"

"You told me when I called from California."

"But did I tell you that I didn't have anything more than a cardboard suitcase? It didn't even have anything in it except for a dress, clean underwear, a Bible, and—this part will make you laugh—a jar of jam."

He laughs. "You're kidding."

"I most certainly am not! I guess I just thought I'd figure the rest out when I got wherever I was going."

"That part makes sense," he says and abandons what he is doing—sitting on top of the suitcase to try and tug the zipper closed that way. "But why the jam?"

She shrugs. "You can get biscuits anywhere, but I figured it would be a long time before I had my aunt's jam again."

"Your aunt?" His face registers surprise. "I thought she was the one who was always so mean to you."

"She was," Ilah confirms. "She made amazing jam, though. Better than any I've had, before or since."

* * *

><p>There is a story about that jam:<p>

Four days after her wedding, Ilah had been in their kitchen. (There hadn't been much point to a honeymoon, had there? She was already pregnant, and they had both agreed that they would rather have a vacation later, when they could actually enjoy it—and it ended up being one of their plans that fell by the wayside, another forgotten promise, but that has nothing and everything to do with this particular story.)

She had longed to prove that she deserved the pair of rings on her left hand, and she had tried to imitate that strawberry jam her aunt had made every summer without fail. It had resulted in dismal failure, and she had been devastated. She probably would have wept anyway—she was a natural crier: she cried when she stubbed her toe, she cried when she burned her bread, she cried when she read sensation stories in the paper—but she probably would not have felt like the world was rent in two if she had not been reeling from the fact that she was now someone's wife and someone else's mother and she was just a girl, just a girl, just a girl.

Her husband had been amused to find her in tears. Her distress appealed to him.

But she had been sitting on the floor with pots boiling over on the stove; one would leave a sticky mess on the wall that would not come off for weeks, regardless of how hard she scrubbed. She wasn't in the mood for his games of cat and mouse.

So when he asked, "What's wrong now?" in a manner that struck her as impatient...

She bit his head off. "I hate everything," she told him, not without heat. "I hate our linoleum. I hate the weather. I hate you. I even hate the baby."

He waited for her to run out of things to say, before he broke in. "No, you don't," he had admonished, and she had tried very, very hard to smile.

"Okay," she admitted. "I don't."

There is no point to telling her son about this story, because he won't understand the point and she is not sure what the point is herself. Her husband has been telling her how to feel for half her life, but this no longer strikes her as strange or worthy of note: this is the way that things are. She had known that the balance of things between them was not right—wrong isn't the right word—once upon a time, but somewhere along the way, she had forgotten.

* * *

><p>The suitcase is a structured canvas bag, and she is wondering whether the thick, sturdy fabric might tear when it finally bends and closes. Her son seals the last few inches with a flourish and leaps to his feet, and she gives him a round of applause. Standing on top of the valise, he takes a bow.<p>

* * *

><p>Most of her revelations about their relationship happened when she was alone, either just after he left or when she was waiting for him to join her.<p>

Another came two years after the wedding. It was her second month of trying for her second child, and she was still in high spirits. Sex made her giddy, and she had been in a fantastic mood—manic, they probably called it now. They had a housekeeper who came three times a week, but she was picking up their discarded clothes with the intention of doing laundry all the same. The majority of her life had been work, work, work, right up until the time they were married; she knew little else.

He had left his shirt on the floor—or, rather, she had divested him of it and let it fall—and she thought nothing of picking it up. When they were engaged, she stole a shirt from his wardrobe so she could enjoy his smell in the privacy of her apartment, a secret she had never told anyone. Picking up the garment, she buried her face in it to inhale the sharp, familiar scent of him, and she stopped cold at a woman's fragrance.

He returned with a brandy for himself to find her waiting with his shirt crumpled in her hand.

"You bastard," she had said, and because she did not feel like that was enough, she said it again. "You bastard."

She had not put any thought into the word. He hated women who swore; he made no secret of it. This had alarmed her when she had first discovered that: she had been in the habit of swearing quite a lot before she had attracted his attention. She had simply wanted to hurt him; she had not thought of the thousands of years of meaning behind the word.

He did.

He seized her by her upper arm, his grasp firm enough to leave angry red welts, and hauled her to her feet. Her thigh banged against the corner of the cedar trunk that sat at the corner of their bed, and the burst of pain jolted her into action. She shoved him away from her with all the strength she possessed, and she heard him laugh to himself, softly.

The next instant, she was on her back on the floor, laying on the oriental rug she had lovingly selected and ordered—she always remembers that part, even more vividly than she remembers what followed. He took her roughly, even though she was far from ready, even though it hurt in a way she had not known that their bodies coming together could hurt. He came. She didn't.

Later, he tried to mollify her. He would never allow an apology to escape his lips, but he made love to her so slowly, so gently that it could only be an attempt at atonement.

Years later, there was a high profile sensation story about whether the state should recognize rape within marriage, and she follows the case obsessively—but that was not until much later, not until she was older and (perhaps) wiser and more willing to see the tears in the curtain.

As it was, she was twenty-two and determined to be a good wife. And so she made a show of looking wounded and sullen over the next few days so that he would spoil her with his attention...but it hurt the next few times they make love, and she had an angry redness on the back of her thighs that made her feel like a punished child, that made her jump when the elastic of her panties or the wool of her skirt brushes against it, that made the very act of sitting down hurt like hell for the next week, and she had a son who believed that his parents merely loved one another in a loud, messy way.

* * *

><p>And at nineteen, he still believes it.<p>

He is attentive for a boy his age. (_Man_, she should say, because he is a man and a good one at that—but the word reminds her of how much time she is carrying around.) Her fatigue does not go unnoticed, and he asks if she is ill. There is concern in his voice but no worry. He is too much of an optimist for anything resembling anxiety.

She folds her hands in her lap. "I'm fine." She raises her chin and tries to believe it. "But I'll tell you something even your father doesn't know yet: I'm going to have another child."

She watches the play of emotions over his face, before it settles on one. "You must be so happy."

For the first time since that morning, she considers the prospect—and decides that he is right. "I am."


End file.
